Recommended Links

Beyond religion, beyond duty, beyond fashion lies J.S. Bach’s music for keyboard. No faith to reaffirm. No Judgment Day to fear – at least in the non-organ works (which were a part of Bach’s professional religious life). His other keyboard music stands apart from the organ pieces – from all of Bach’s output, actually – and require little or no cultural extrapolation to understand what it’s saying.

All tidily packaged, the Partitas, English Suites and French Suites come in sets of six, based on baroque dance and sometimes showing Bach at his open-heartedness. The Well-Tempered Clavier comes in two books (1722 and 1742), each consisting of 24 preludes and fugues. The Art of the Fugue (published in 1751 a year after Bach’s death) is a magnum opus of 14 fugues and two canons that appears to be conceived for keyboard but may well transcend instruments and is better studied than heard.

Some see Bach’s keyboard music as models of Germanic obsession, of pursuing an idea doggedly until every single possibility is exhausted. Really, 48 preludes and fugues in the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier? Others thank God that he did with such a limitless sense of invention, the two sets showing Bach at different points in his compositional evolution but operating with a beauty of logic sends people back to Bach to cleanse their ears after so much earthly Beethovenian angst. This music is also central to understanding Bach.

Book I is the most popular due to its thematic strengths. You can’t quite call the music tuneful because of its tabula rasa qualities. But once heard, one never forgets how Bach weaves magic out of the basic C-major chord in the first prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier. It enters your psyche with an effortless directness, like a glass of pure spring water that, in fact, mixes well with most anything. No wonder, then, that the music elicits such vastly different but convincing performances, some from the harpsichord community (Wanda Landowska’s majesty and Kenneth Gilbert’s elegance) others by pianists (Glenn Gould’s clarity-at-all-costs approach and Sviatoslav Richter’s existential confession).

The main point of entry to Bach’s music in our times is the Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, and written for Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, supposedly as insomnia music. As if anybody could sleep through Glenn Gould’s legendary 1955 recording? Gould misrepresented the piece by ignoring repeats and using wild, willful tempos that prompted critics at that time to call it jet-propelled Bach. Yet he brought charisma and romance to the music that was unprecedented in modern times. Since then, classic recordings by Andras Schiff, Angela Hewitt and Pierre Hantai have given the piece an expanse that make its journey as epic, in its way, as that of the St. Matthew Passion.

The Art of the Fugue is not often heard: It feels rarefied, beyond emotion, concerned mostly with the science and industry of fugal construction. The romanticist could run with the fact that Bach left the final and most complex fugue unfinished amid encroaching blindness and illness. Shades of Icarus? Did Bach come fatally close to the perfection of the God to whom he dedicated all of his works? Though scholars suggest the fugue was intentionally unfinished so others would attempt to do so, I believe that only death would stop Bach from finishing what he started.

Comments [4]

Bradley Lehman
from Virginia

Back in 1992, I prepared several public performances of the Art of Fugue on harpsichord. That, to me, has been an essential way to approach the piece: not just by listening to it and analyzing it on paper, but getting my hands around every phrase and feeling it all proceed. It takes profound concentration to deliver (85 minutes of stamina), and months of diligent practice and analysis to work out and perfect the necessary fingerings. This piece taught me new ways to approach the performance of physically-difficult and mentally-intense music.

I question the author's characterization of The Art of the Fugue:{{The Art of the Fugue ... is better studied than heard....The Art of the Fugue is not often heard: It feels rarefied, beyond emotion, concerned mostly with the science and industry of fugal construction.}}

Being better studied than heard is impossible; music without emotional impact when well-played is not worth studying.

I have heard 2 performances of the whole thing by mixed consorts (1 live; 1 on tape). I have 2 often-played CD-s of the whole thing, 1 by saxophone quartet and 1 by string quartet. Many brass ensembles have included fine performances of individual fugues in their CD-s. Like at least 99.9% of Bach's output, A of F is good (often great) music. And music is to be heard.

As for the mysterious end of Art of Fugue, I like the theory of Christoph Wolff (nb: it's fun hearing him throughout Bach 360) who posits a Fragment X which would have featured the completed section of the planned four-part fugue XIV, and was perhaps lost. The arguments go something like this: 1) the empty staves immediately following the current "unfinished" section of the manuscript are totally unusable. It wasn't that Bach died just at that point (which we know is anyway a romantic fiction perpetuated by his son), but more likely that he either had already written the complex "solution" to the four-themed fugue (the final theme of which was to be the initial and recurrent theme from the first fugue), or wrote it down chronologically, but on a suitable piece of paper. I do agree with the author that it's unlikely Bach would have intentionally left the ending off as a challenge, though inadvertently, it became that for quite a few people who have tried their hand at a conclusion (Tovey, et al). Sadly, unless -- miracle of miracles! -- Fragment X turns up in a library somewhere, some day, we'll never know precisely how Bach wrapped it all up.